Front Row

Rita Ora on her six year journey to release her second album Phoenix, following a legal dispute with her record label. The musician, who has also acted in the Fifty Shades film trilogy and been a judge on television talent shows The Voice and The X-Factor, talks to John Wilson about finally being able to release music, song writing and her Albanian heritage.This year’s Bad Sex In Fiction award was won by James Frey and also had an all-male shortlist. So what defines good and bad writing of sex in literature, and why do men seem to be worse at it than women? Novelist Matt Thorne and Rowan Pelling, founding editor of the Erotic Review now of The Amorist, discuss.Unbelievably, Die Hard is 30 years old this year. Stand-up poet Kate Fox considers why this thriller starring Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman is such a classic.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Sarah Johnson

Not Going Out is the UK’s longest-running sitcom on TV and will this year bring a live edition to our screens for Christmas. The show’s star and creator Lee Mack talks about its surprising longevity, the changing face of British comedy, and his childhood dream of being a jockey.From real life to the big screen and now the casino stage, Channing Tatum’s outstandingly popular Magic Mike is now in London’s West End. Though in the light of the #MeToo movement, the show is compared by female comedian Sophie Linder-Lee, who reveals that there is a message behind the performance, and how demanding a show it is to control.Jeremy Noel-Tod has gathered poems from all over the world and created a new 400-page anthology. But these poems don’t rhyme and they are not metrical. They are not arranged in stanzas, nor even lines. Noel-Tod is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and together with the writer Michèle Roberts who has composed some, explains what a prose poem is, how it came about, and the allure of this particular form.Presenter Stig Abell Producer Jerome Weatherald

Two new films with comic book superheroes at the centre - Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse and Aquaman - have just been released. Aquaman is DC’s follow-up to their hugely successful 2017 film Wonder Woman, while Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is an animated superhero film which imagines Spidermen (and women) from alternative universes who team up. Critic Gavia Baker-Whitelaw has seen both and gives her verdict on which will come out on top in the battle for the box-office.Mike Bartlett, Olivier Award-winning playwright whose work includes Love, Love, Love and King Charles III, and on television, crime drama The Town and Doctor Foster, returns to The Old Fire Station in Oxford where his very first play (co-authored) was produced when he was 18. His latest work, Snowflake, written especially for this theatre at Christmas, is a story of a father and his daughter estranged partly because of their differing views on leaving the EU.Whilst snowflakes might be 'triggered' by the term snowflake - a pejorative term describing the real or imagined sensitivity of the younger generation - how is 'generation snowflake' being represented in the arts? Author and academic Tiffany Jenkins, pop culture journalist Holly Rose Swinyard and writer Ella Whelan discuss the so-called snowflake generation and what the cultural response to it reveals about both the term itself and the current state of the intergenerational relations.Presenter Kirsty Lang Producer Hilary Dunn

Mortal Engines is a new sci-fi fantasy film co-written and produced by Peter Jackson, based on the first in a series of young adult steampunk novels by Philip Reeve. In a post-apocalyptic future, mobile cities on huge caterpillar tracks roam the landscape, consuming smaller towns for their resources. Starring Hera Hilmar as Hester Shaw, the film is the directorial debut of long-time Jackson collaborator Christian Rivers. Katie Popperwell reviews.In a year when housing has risen up the political agenda, Richard Gregory, artistic director of Quarantine theatre company, and performance artist Grace Surman discuss Tenancy, part of a Manchester-led international project which explores the changing nature of cities by artists taking over a residential home for a year.The work of the Chinese photographer Ren Hang found admirers worldwide and was championed by Ai Weiwei, though the Chinese authorities were less enamoured. Almost two years after his death at the age of 29 and with the first show of his work in the UK premiering at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, Laura Robertson, critical writer-in-residence at the gallery discusses Ren Hang’s significance. When Martin Jenkinson was made redundant from the Sheffield steel industry in 1979, it was the start of a four decade-long career as a professional photographer whose first subject was his adopted city. His pictures of the 1984 – 85 miners’ strike were widely published in the national press. Years later they would catch the eye of Turner-prizewinning artist Jeremy Deller who worked with Jenkinson on his recreation of The Battle of Orgreave. Art critic Orla Foster reviews the new retrospective of Jenkinson’s photographs at Weston Park Museum in Sheffield.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Ekene Akalawu

Tamara Lawrance stars in new BBC One drama The Long Song, an adaption of the Andrea Levy novel set on a sugar plantation during the final days of slavery in 19th century Jamaica. The actress talks about the drama as well as her career so far, which in the three years since leaving drama school has seen her play Viola in Twelfth Night at the National Theatre, Cordelia opposite Ian McKellen's Lear in Chichester and Prince Harry’s republican girlfriend in BBC One’s Charles III. Meet Vermeer is a new initiative between The Hague's Mauritshuis gallery and Google Arts and Culture which brings together all 36 authenticated works of 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer in an augmented reality experience viewable via the Google Arts and Culture app on a smartphone. Art critic Estelle Lovatt reviews the virtual museum and chooses some of her favourite art apps.Matty Healy, frontman for The 1975 discusses the band’s third album A Brief Enquiry into Online Relationships which looks at addiction, depression and social media. Matty, who is almost 30, explains why the band connects so strongly with their huge teenage fan base and why the album represents the millennial generation.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Edwina Pitman

As Bruce Springsteen nears the end of his 236-show run in New York, Kate Mossman reviews Springsteen on Broadway, the new Netflix film of his stage show based on his autobiography Born to Run, in which he looks back on his life and performs songs on acoustic guitar and piano.From James Bond nemesis Blofeld to Scar from the Lion King – facial disfigurements have long been commonplace for cinematic villains. A new campaign by the charity Changing Faces and the BFI, I Am Not Your Villain, wants to end the use of “scars, burns or marks as shorthand for villainy”. Kirsty talks to Changing Faces CEO Becky Hewitt and film podcaster Mike Muncer.Sarah Shaffi selects the most beautiful books to buy as presents this Christmas. In the age of streaming music and films, do books make better gifts? And theatre critic Lyn Gardner discusses the difficult financial situation facing the Liverpool Everyman Theatre, which has announced the closure of its repertory theatre company. Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Timothy Prosser

Screenwriter Jimmy McGovern talks about his new BBC One drama Care, starring Sheridan Smith, Alison Steadman and Sinead Keenan, which looks at the personal challenges of caring for a parent with dementia and the struggle to find good and affordable care.Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera talks to us from her home in Havana and explains why she is continuing to protest over Decree 349, a new law that will require artists to obtain a government licence, despite Bruguera being arrested twice this week by the authorities. BBC Correspondent in Havana, Will Grant, explains the context and implications of the new law. How can the arts help people with insomnia? We speak to two artists making work to fall asleep to – Richard Talbot of band Marconi Union, who worked with a sound therapist to write the soporific track Weightless, and Phoebe Smith, Sleep Storyteller-in-Residence for the sleep app Calm.Presenter John Wilson Producer Edwina Pitman

Maggi Hambling discusses her new exhibition The Quick and the Dead at Jerwood Gallery in Hastings, which centres on paintings and drawings made over the past decade, in which she has portrayed four fellow artists - Sebastian Horsley, Sarah Lucas, Julian Simmons and Juergen Teller - whose lives have intersected at various points, and who have created their own reciprocal artistic interpretations.Nearly 40 years ago, three white Jewish teenagers called Adam Horovitz, Adam Yauch and Michael Diamond became Ad-Rock, MCA and Mike D when they stopped playing hardcore punk and took up rap. The hip hop group Beastie Boys went on to gain 3 Grammy awards and sell 50 million records worldwide. Stig talks to Mike D and Ad Rock about their new book - which is as much dedicated to MCA, who died in 2012, as it is to documenting the band’s history.With actor Ellie Kendrick making her professional debut as a playwright with Hole at the Royal Court in London this week, she and theatre critic David Benedict consider the long tradition of the actor-turned-playwright, from Shakespeare and Garrick to Pinter and Rory Kinnear.Presenter Stig Abell Producer Jerome Weatherald

Twelve flights. Twelve travellers. Twelve stories. David Szalay talks about his new book, Turbulence, which features lives in turmoil, each in some way touching the next. David Szalay was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016 – and Turbulence is an original Radio 4 commission. The 55th annual Golden Horse awards, dubbed the "Chinese Oscars", saw An Elephant Sitting Still win best picture. Created by novelist-turned-director Hu Bo, who adapted it from his own book, it tells the story of four people in a society plagued by cruelty and violence. As the film is released in the UK, critic Simran Hans gives her verdict and Asian film expert, Andrew Heskins, discusses the wider landscape of cinema in China and the way the industry is changing.This weekend UNESCO added the reggae music of Jamaica to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, a programme that looks to protect and promote traditions or living expressions of cultural identity. To discuss the programme and the decision to include reggae on this year’s list we speak to Assistant Director-General for Culture of UNESCO Ernesto Ottone, plus music journalist Kevin LeGendre considers what this means for reggae. Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Hannah Robins

For his final role as an actor, Robert Redford plays a charming bank robber in The Old Man and the Gun, harking back to his early roles in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. Tim Robey reviews. Booker prize winning narrator of Anna Burns’s Milkman reads 19th century novels as she cannot bear the 20th century. What do other fictional characters read and what does it reveal about them, their authors and the period in which the books were written. John Bown, Professor of Literature at York university joins to discuss fiction within fictionPoet Fred D'Aguiar's new collection, Translations from Memory, starts with Gilgamesh, the earliest poem and ends with with a response Kamau Brathwaite, the poet from Barbados, who is still alive. It includes responses to philosophers - Spinoza, Hume, Kant - to writers - Lorca, Akhmatova, Seferis - to scientists such as Marie Curie, to political leaders - Nelson Mandela - to religion - Islam - and great movements such as the Reformation. He talks to Samira Ahmed about writing poems about what amounts to the whole of western civilisation and history. Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Julian May